“Predicting the Future – Is it Possible?” – FreightHub interview with Transmetrics

In the recent interview with The Insider, a FreightHub’s Blog publication, Transmetrics Co-founder and CEO Asparuh Koev shared his insights on how Predictive Analytics and Artificial Intelligence will help to positively influence the logistics landscape.

“We saw that transport companies had problems with optimizing their capacity – too much spare capacity, too much space in their vehicles, too many empty containers sitting around, and too many trucks which were only used for 1/3 of the time,”

– stated Asparuh, when answering the question about how and why did co-founders decide to get into this type of business [Predictive optimization for cargo]

“One of our large customers is using Transmetrics’ predictive analytics software to forecast expected shipping volumes one week in advance and to optimize the amount of trucks needed to deliver all the shipments. This company has been able to reduce truck departures by 25%. As a result, an 8-9 percent total cost saving has been achieved. In addition, the company has improved pricing accuracy by measuring the delivery cost of each parcel and identified low or negative margin customers and adjusted their pricing accordingly.”

When asked about how big of a challenge is it to convince corporations to trust AI, big data and predictive analytics, Asparuh responded –

“You don’t convince corporations, you convince people. And then different people have different levels of challenge. Of course, the CEO of the company wants to have these technologies. He wants the company to be unique and to be different from others. So they are relatively easy to convince to try it.”

“The operational people might feel threatened because of this misconception about AI, which eventually, is going to eat our jobs. So they may be resistant at the beginning, but the key is to explain to them the fact that we are not giving something to take away their jobs. Instead, we are offering them a powerful instrument to make them much better at what they are doing, and that this tool is going to give them more time to think strategically, rather than dealing with small details of the daily operations.”